Castro knew mother's value from beginning

Updated 8:16 pm, Friday, October 5, 2012

I'm not saying Julián Castro nurtured his ambitions early, but he first called me about 17 or 18 years ago when he was an undergraduate at Stanford and I was an Express-News columnist.

He was home on a break and wanted to have breakfast to talk about what was going on in San Antonio. It became a regular event on his visits home from Stanford and, later, from Harvard Law School.

We usually met at Pico de Gallo, the bustling restaurant on the west end of downtown. It was a good place to watch City Council members being wooed by City Hall lobbyists.

I enjoyed the sessions. Julián was a bright young man and a good conversationalist. I'm sure he impressed others he similarly sought out.

In late 2000 or early 2001, after he graduated and was working with the San Antonio office of the giant Akin Gump law firm, he set up another breakfast. This time his twin brother Joaquin was with him. He also was working at Akin Gump.

Julián quickly got to the point. He was planning to run for City Council and wanted to know my opinion of his chances. It was an audacious move. At 26, Julián was seeking to become the youngest San Antonio city councilman ever elected at that time.

When Rosie Castro came of age, all the state legislators in Bexar County were elected countywide. The scheme was quite transparent, but it wasn't until 1973 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this system in Bexar County (and Dallas County) was an unconstitutional method of effectively excluding blacks and Mexican-Americans from the political process.

San Antonio's entire City Council was also elected citywide. During the 20-year reign of the Good Government League, which ended in the mid-1970s, the council regularly included a couple of Hispanics and a black, but with few exceptions they were hand-picked by the League's leaders in closed sessions — and they knew who put them there.

It's hardly a surprise that Rosie Castro became disaffected from the Democratic Party, and active in the fledgling Raza Unida Party that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In 1971, she ran for City Council under the Raza Unida banner, and lost. Although Raza Unida gained traction by winning city and county posts in a couple of rural areas, it faded by the late 1970s. But Rosie continued to pursue politics and community activism.

She became an ombudsman for the San Antonio Housing Authority, and was a major organizer for longtime City Councilwoman Maria Berriozábal. By the time Julian ran for City Council, there weren't many politically aware citizens on the West Side of San Antonio who didn't know and respect Rosie.

It was good to see Julian give his mother recognition at the Democratic National Convention. But given the tenor of national politics it is not surprising that her son's prominence and promise made her a target for some in the Republican Party. More on that in another column.